Cadet Peter Preston was played by Ike Eisenmann in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, established in that film’s script and director’s cut as Montgomery Scott’s nephew. Scott’s dislike for Peter Preston’s father was established in DC Comics’ Star Trek (Volume 1) Annual #3, “Retrospect,” by Peter David and Curt Swan. Peter’s adventures bear a certain resemblance to the experiences of Eisenmann’s character in the short-lived 1977 NBC television series The Fantastic Journey, story-edited by Star Trek’s D. C. Fontana.

My placement of the tractor beam control on the movie-era bridge is conjectural. The original set plans show that it was intended to be a fold-out console adjacent to the engineering station, but this was never built. The forward starboard station is labeled on the set as “gravity control,” and its console is repurposed from what was meant to be a bridge transporter station, with controls for aiming and operating a beam. Thus, it seemed a logical place for the tractor beam control. Thanks to Donny Versiga for his detailed digital reconstructions of the movie sets, which have been of invaluable assistance for the bridge scenes in my past two novels.

The song “Two Moons” is my own composition, written in the late 1990s for an early iteration of the Troubleshooter universe featured in my novel Only Superhuman and various short stories. It was conceived as a colonial Martian pop song using the orbital dynamics of Mars’s moons Phobos and Deimos as an extended metaphor. As Uhura said, the lyrics seemed appropriate here.

S’rrel is the name the Decipher role-playing games proposed for the brown-furred Caitian counselor from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Joel Randolph is the name given in that film’s script to the Yorktown captain ultimately played by tennis star Vijay Amritraj. The Starfleet Headquarters set seen in that film was called the major missions room (uncapitalized) in Vonda N. McIntyre’s novelization.

The (apparent) destruction of the original Solar L5 colonies was depicted in The Lost Era: The Sundered by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels. Mizuki City is named for the director of the Vanguard L5 colony from that novel.

The physics of the primordial universe, vacuum energy, and quantum wormholes depicted herein is largely grounded in reality. However, theory tells us that the primordial plasma was in thermal equilibrium, too uniform for anything like life to emerge. I’ve fudged things a bit to suggest that the transition out of that phase was turbulent enough to allow complexity.